Symphony ends season in rollicking fashion

If Stockton Symphony music director and conductor Peter Jaffe set out to prove not all wonderful concert music was composed by 18th and 19th century Europeans, he succeeded Thursday evening with a rollicking performance ending the symphony's regular concert season.

If Stockton Symphony music director and conductor Peter Jaffe set out to prove not all wonderful concert music was composed by 18th and 19th century Europeans, he succeeded Thursday evening with a rollicking performance ending the symphony's regular concert season.

In a program of Revueltas, a Mexican; Prokofiev, a Russian; and Ravel, a Frenchman, Jaffe put together a selection demonstrating the power and wonder that 20th century composers offer listeners. There will be another opportunity to listen when the concert repeats at 6 p.m. today in the Atherton Auditorium on the San Joaquin Delta College campus.

The performance opened with Silvestre Revueltas's "Sensemaya," a short - under 10 minutes - tone poem inspired by a Cuban poem about killing a snake, metaphorically seen as the act of casting off slavery.

To set the stage for the work, Jaffe enlisted Isaiah Stowers who gave an energetic reading of Nicolas Guillen's poem in Spanish. Stowers' energy was repeated by the orchestra that filled the hall with Revueltas' ever-changing rhythms and dissonance.

Sadly, less enthusiastic was the reaction of the audience to this sparkling but relatively unknown piece - at least to American ears - that some call the Mexican "Rite of Spring" (it doesn't take a particularly well-trained ear to find similarities to the Igor Stravinsky masterpiece).

It's not often that concertgoers are treated to two harps, a wind-sound machine, a full orchestra and choir - about 150 on-stage performers in all - but that was the big sound Jaffe used as the capstone of the symphony's 85th season.

Ravel, of course, was among that group of late 19th and early 20th century mostly French composers - Claude Debussy and Gabriel Faure, among others - sometimes called impressionists. Most of them disliked the label, including Ravel (by the commonly understood definition of such music, Ludwig van Beethoven's Sixth Symphony is just a little ditty about a storm), but in "Daphnis et Chloe" it's easy to understand how listeners could form impressions or pictures from the music.

"Daphnis et Chloe" - without an knowledge of the ballet and the story behind the work - is at one moment ethereal, almost out of body, and in the next whipping the listener back to earth trying to hold on as the sound of birds and brooks is replaced by a wall of music and a chorus singing without words.

The power of Jaffe's Ravel reading is reminiscent of the symphony's 2002 performance of Carl Orff's "Carmina Burana"; very different music but the same kind of a sit down, strap in and hang on season finale.

In his pre-concert remarks, Jaffe, almost as a warning, talked about Prokofiev's love of what on first hearing are strange harmonics and how after a time those tones don't seem strange at all. He played an example from "Peter and the Wolf," also a Prokofiev composition that has harmonics that now seem anything but strange.

The warning probably wasn't necessary for a popular concert standard like the Prokofiev Third. It certainly wasn't necessary in the hands - literally - of pianist Pompa-Baldi.

As a performer, Pompa-Baldi isn't given to theatrics, which is not to say he's simply a technician. He just avoids the annoying habit of some performers to draw attention to themselves, Jerry Lee Lewis-style. Pompa-Baldi lets his fingers and the music speak for themselves.

On Thursday both spoke well. Applause brought him back to the stage four times, including an encore performance of Liszt's Nocturne No. 9, "The Bells of Geneva."